Doug J. Chung

Doug J. Chung is the MBA Class of 1962 Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Sales & Sales Force Management and Business-to-Business Marketing in the second year MBA Elective Curriculum. He also teaches Marketing Models in the DBA Curriculum and in various Executive Education programs at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. He has previously taught the core Marketing course in the first year MBA Required Curriculum.

Professor Chung focuses his research primarily on sales force management and incentive compensation. He has worked with firms worldwide to develop effective employee incentive compensation systems and his work has been published inMarketing Science, Management Science,Journal of Marketing Research,Harvard Business Review, and theEuropean Financial Review. His current work examines how different elements of an incentive compensation plan affect the performance of varying types of sales agents.

Professor Chung earned his Ph.D. in management at Yale University, where he also earned an M.A. and M.Phil. in management. He is the recipient of the ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award, ISBM Doctoral Support Award, and the Mary Kay Doctoral Dissertation Award, and he was the finalist for the 2014 John D. C. Little Award and the 2015 Frank M. Bass Award. He is also a member of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. He was selected as a 2017 MSI Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute. He completed his undergraduate studies at Korea University. Prior to pursuing a career in academics, Professor Chung served as an officer and platoon commander in the South Korean Special Warfare Command. He also held a variety of industry positions with several multinational companies.

Featured Work

We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of various forms of conditional and unconditional compensation. We account for salesperson heterogeneity by using a hierarchical Bayesian framework to estimate our model. We find conditional compensation in the form of quota-bonus incentives to improve performance; however, it may lead to lower future performance. We find little evidence that effectiveness differs between a quota-bonus plan and a punitive-bonus plan framed as a penalty for not achieving quota. We find unconditional compensation in the form of reciprocity to be effective at improving sales force performance only when given as a delayed reward of which the effectiveness decreases with repeated exposure. We also find heterogeneity in the impact of compensation on performance across salespeople; unconditional compensation is more effective for salespeople with high base performance, whereas conditional compensation is equally effective across all types of salespeople.

Intercollegiate athletics in the United States have become a multibillion-dollar industry over the past several decades. In this study, we investigate the short- and long-term direct monetary effects of operating a winning athletics program for an academic institution of higher education. We construct a unique panel dataset from multiple sources and utilize the latest dynamic panel data estimation methods to account for heterogeneity while also addressing endogeneity concerns. We find that success in men’s football and basketball has a significant impact on a school’s respective football and basketball revenues; however, the effect is different based on the type of school. We find that regular season wins in football account for most of the increase in revenue for established schools whereas invitations to prestigious postseason bowl games play a big part for less-established schools. Furthermore, we find that student population and education quality dissipate the effect of athletic success on monetary payoffs. We find that success in basketball carries over more from the past than in football with additional contemporaneous marginal effects for established schools. We do find, however, that past athletic success carries over significantly to the present in both football and basketball, suggesting the significance of the long-term monetary effect of athletic success to many academic institutions in the United States.

Much of what we believe about the best ways to compensate and motivate the sales force is based on theory and lab experiments. But in the past decade, researchers have been moving out of the lab and into the field, analyzing companies' sales and pay data, and conducting experiments involving actual salespeople. The findings from this new wave of research support some current compensation practices but call others into question. For example, studies clearly show that caps on commissions hurt sales. If managers must retain a cap, they should set it as high as possible to avoid reducing reps' incentives. Although overly complicated compensation systems have their downsides, research has found that a system needs to include enough elements (such as quarterly performance and overachievement bonuses) to keep high performers, low performers, and average performers engaged throughout the year. Managers should be careful in setting and adjusting quotas. For instance, studies show that ratcheting (raising a salesperson's annual quota if he or she exceeded it the previous year) dampens motivation. The research also suggests that it's important to pay attention to the timing of bonuses: a reward given at the end of a period is more motivating than one given at the beginning.

For practical reasons, many companies offer a common incentive plan to an entire sales force rather than offering customised plans for each individual. Doug J. Chung, Thomas Steenburgh, and K. Sudhir address how companies can design a single plan that motivates everyone to work to the best of their abilities.

I measure the spillover effect of intercollegiate athletics on the quantity and quality of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States, popularly known as the "Flutie Effect." I treat athletic success as a stock of goodwill that decays over time, similar to that of advertising. Overall, athletic success has a significant long-term goodwill effect on future applications and quality. However, students with lower than average SAT scores tend to have a stronger preference for athletic success, while students with higher SAT scores have a greater preference for academic quality.

We estimate a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus based compensation plan. Substantively, the paper sheds insights on how different elements of the compensation plan enhance productivity. We find evidence that: (1) bonuses enhance productivity across all segments; (2) overachievement commissions help sustain the high productivity of the best performers even after attaining quotas; and (3) quarterly bonuses help improve performance of the weak performers by serving as pacers to keep the sales force on track to achieve their annual sales quotas. The paper also introduces two main methodological innovations to the marketing literature: First, we implement empirically the method proposed by Arcidiacono and Miller (2011) to accommodate unobserved latent class heterogeneity using a computationally light two-step estimator. Second, we illustrate how discount factors can be estimated in a dynamic structural model using field data through a combination of (1) an exclusion restriction separating current and future payoff and (2) a finite horizon model in which there is no forward looking behavior in the last period.

Publications

We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of various forms of conditional and unconditional compensation. We account for salesperson heterogeneity by using a hierarchical Bayesian framework to estimate our model. We find conditional compensation in the form of quota-bonus incentives to improve performance; however, it may lead to lower future performance. We find little evidence that effectiveness differs between a quota-bonus plan and a punitive-bonus plan framed as a penalty for not achieving quota. We find unconditional compensation in the form of reciprocity to be effective at improving sales force performance only when given as a delayed reward of which the effectiveness decreases with repeated exposure. We also find heterogeneity in the impact of compensation on performance across salespeople; unconditional compensation is more effective for salespeople with high base performance, whereas conditional compensation is equally effective across all types of salespeople.

Intercollegiate athletics in the United States have become a multibillion-dollar industry over the past several decades. In this study, we investigate the short- and long-term direct monetary effects of operating a winning athletics program for an academic institution of higher education. We construct a unique panel dataset from multiple sources and utilize the latest dynamic panel data estimation methods to account for heterogeneity while also addressing endogeneity concerns. We find that success in men's football and basketball has a significant impact on a school's respective football and basketball revenues; however, the effect is different based on the type of school. We find that regular season wins in football account for most of the increase in revenue for established schools whereas invitations to prestigious postseason bowl games play a big part for less-established schools. Furthermore, we find that student population and education quality dissipate the effect of athletic success on monetary payoffs. We find that success in basketball carries over more from the past than in football with additional contemporaneous marginal effects for established schools. We do find, however, that past athletic success carries over significantly to the present in both football and basketball, suggesting the significance of the long-term monetary effect of athletic success to many academic institutions in the United States.

Much of what we believe about the best ways to compensate and motivate the sales force is based on theory and lab experiments. But in the past decade, researchers have been moving out of the lab and into the field, analyzing companies' sales and pay data, and conducting experiments involving actual salespeople. The findings from this new wave of research support some current compensation practices but call others into question. For example, studies clearly show that caps on commissions hurt sales. If managers must retain a cap, they should set it as high as possible to avoid reducing reps' incentives. Although overly complicated compensation systems have their downsides, research has found that a system needs to include enough elements (such as quarterly performance and overachievement bonuses) to keep high performers, low performers, and average performers engaged throughout the year. Managers should be careful in setting and adjusting quotas. For instance, studies show that ratcheting (raising a salesperson's annual quota if he or she exceeded it the previous year) dampens motivation. The research also suggests that it's important to pay attention to the timing of bonuses: a reward given at the end of a period is more motivating than one given at the beginning.

We estimate a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus based compensation plan. Substantively, the paper sheds insights on how different elements of the compensation plan enhance productivity. We find evidence that: (1) bonuses enhance productivity across all segments; (2) overachievement commissions help sustain the high productivity of the best performers even after attaining quotas; and (3) quarterly bonuses help improve performance of the weak performers by serving as pacers to keep the sales force on track to achieve their annual sales quotas. The paper also introduces two main methodological innovations to the marketing literature: First, we implement empirically the method proposed by Arcidiacono and Miller (2011) to accommodate unobserved latent class heterogeneity using a computationally light two-step estimator. Second, we illustrate how discount factors can be estimated in a dynamic structural model using field data through a combination of (1) an exclusion restriction separating current and future payoff and (2) a finite horizon model in which there is no forward looking behavior in the last period.

I measure the spillover effect of intercollegiate athletics on the quantity and quality of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States, popularly known as the "Flutie Effect." I treat athletic success as a stock of goodwill that decays over time, similar to that of advertising. A major challenge is that privacy laws prevent us from observing information about the applicant pool. I overcome this challenge by using order statistic distribution to infer applicant quality from information on enrolled students. Using a flexible random coefficients aggregate discrete choice model that accommodates heterogeneity in preferences for school quality and athletic success, and an extensive set of school fixed effects to control for unobserved quality in athletics and academics, I estimate the impact of athletic success on applicant quality and quantity. Overall, athletic success has a significant long-term goodwill effect on future applications and quality. However, students with lower than average SAT scores tend to have a stronger preference for athletic success, while students with higher SAT scores have a greater preference for academic quality. Furthermore, the decay rate of athletics goodwill is significant only for students with lower SAT scores, suggesting that the goodwill created by intercollegiate athletics resides more extensively with low-ability students than with their high-ability counterparts. But, surprisingly, athletic success impacts applications even among academically stronger students.

Companies typically compensate their sales force by using some combination of salary, commission, and bonuses, but executives are often unsure which incentives provide the best motivation. Should bonuses be tied to quotas or should they be given unconditionally? Is it better to use bonuses as a reward or as punishment? A randomized field experiment at a large Indian company investigated these questions, finding that conditional bonuses were more than twice as effective as unconditional bonuses. The results have implications for companies trying to use bonuses to more effectively manage their salespeople.

We estimate a sales response model to evaluate the short- and long-term value of pharmaceutical sales representatives' detailing visits to physicians of different types. By understanding the dynamic effect of sales calls across heterogeneous doctors, we provide guidance on the design of optimal call patterns for route sales. Our analyses reveal that the long-term persistence effect of detailing is more pronounced for specialist physicians; the contemporaneous marginal effect is higher for generalists. Free samples have little effect on any type of physician. We also introduce a key methodological innovation to the marketing and economics literature. We show that moment conditions—typically used in traditional dynamic panel data methods—are vulnerable to serial correlation in the error structure. However, traditional tests to detect serial correlation have weak power and can be misleading, resulting in misuse of moment conditions and incorrect inference. We present an appropriate set of moment conditions to properly address serially correlated errors in analyzing dynamic panel data.

We estimate a structural model that takes into account the entry decisions of retail stores and their corollary effects on total shopping mall sales. By understanding the endogenous behavior of individual store entry, we provide guidance on location choice for mall developers. We find negative competition effects to dominate within store categories—especially among discount and midscale stores—but positive agglomeration effects to exist across store categories. Although varying by store brand, our results suggest that upscale stores are likely to enter malls in more populated, affluent areas, whereas midscale stores enter less populated, lower-income areas. We find positive causal brand effects for specific upscale and midscale stores, above and beyond market effects, but find negative causal brand effects for all discount stores on mall sales. This paper also introduces three main methodological innovations to the marketing literature. First, we correct for endogeneity with regard to both store entry and mall sales to identify the causal effect of store entry on mall sales. Second, we address multiple equilibria by estimating equilibrium selection from the observed data. Finally, we overcome the computational burden of solving games of complete information with multiple equilibria by utilizing the GPGPU technology, using multiple processing cores in a graphics processing unit to noticeably increase computational speed.

We collaborate with a Swedish retail chain to conduct a field experiment in which we change the sales force compensation scheme from a monthly to a daily quota plan. This intervention, along with a control group that did not encounter a change in compensation structure, allows us to analyze the effect of quota frequency on sales force performance. Over a given time frame (i.e., a month), we find that shifting to a temporally more frequent quota plan—the daily quota plan as compared to the monthly quota plan—leads to an increase in sales performance, mainly for low-performing salespeople, by preventing them from giving up in the latter days of a month. However, we find high-performing salespeople to give up more frequently in earlier days of a month under the daily quota plan. With more frequent quotas, salespeople sell more quantities of low-ticket items, which benefit the firm through a decrease in returned merchandise. However, with quotas set over shorter time horizons, even the highest-performing salespeople focus mainly on incremental sales, resulting in a decrease in sales of higher-value-added and higher-margin products, thereby hurting firm profits.

The platform—a business model that creates value by connecting groups of users—is increasingly popular in many industries. Extant papers largely assume that platforms dominate the pricing decision, whereas in practice, prices in business-to-business transactions are often determined by a bargaining process. We study how the relative bargaining power of business partners affects pricing and competition in a two-sided market. We compile a unique and comprehensive dataset using sales data from the U.S. daily deal market and specify a structural model based on Nash bargaining solutions. We find that Groupon, the larger deal platform, has more price-bargaining power than LivingSocial and that larger and chain merchants have more bargaining power than smaller and independent merchants. The difference in bargaining power between different types of merchants, interestingly, is more substantial on LivingSocial than on Groupon. Therefore, the size of a platform has two faces: while a larger customer base helps attract merchants, the platform’s bargaining power may motivate some merchants to work with its smaller competitors, over which they have more influence on price setting. Our counterfactual results show that the allocation of price-bargaining power plays an important role in the daily deal markets and that merchants are significantly worse off if platforms have higher price-bargaining power during the negotiation. Furthermore, as it increases the bargaining power, LivingSocial would be able to boost its profits but lose its attraction in acquiring merchants.

We examine the effects of various political campaign activities on voter preferences in the domain of US Presidential elections. We construct a comprehensive data set that covers the three most recent elections, with detailed records of voter preferences at the state-week level over an election period. We include various types of the most frequently utilized marketing instruments: two forms of advertising—candidate’s own and outside advertising, and two forms of personal selling—retail campaigning and field operations. Although effectiveness varies by instrument and party, among the significant effects we find that a candidate’s own advertising is more effective than outside advertising, and that campaign advertising works more favorably towards Republican candidates. In contrast, field operations are more effective for Democratic candidates, primarily through the get-out-the-vote efforts. We do not find any between-party differences in the effectiveness of outside advertising. Lastly, we also find a moderate but statistically significant carryover effect of campaign activities, indicating the presence of dynamics of marketing efforts over time.

Firms increasingly use both mass-media advertising and targeted personal selling to promote products and brands. In this study, we jointly examine the effects of advertising and personal selling in the context of U.S. presidential elections, where the former is referred to as the "air war" and the latter as the "ground game." Specifically, we look at how different types of advertising—the candidate's own advertising versus outside advertising—and personal selling—in the form of field office operations—affect voter preference. Furthermore, we ask how these campaign activities affect voting decisions through their diverse effects on various types of people. We compiled a unique and comprehensive dataset from multiple sources that record vote outcomes and campaign activities for the 2004-2012 U.S. presidential elections. Individuals' voting preference is modeled via a random-coefficient aggregate discrete-choice model, in which we incorporate individual heterogeneity and use instrumental variables to account for the endogeneity concern associated with campaign resource allocation. Among the many results, we find that personal selling has a stronger effect on partisan voters than on nonpartisans, while a candidate's own advertising is better received by nonpartisans. We also find that outside ads behave very differently from candidate's own ads by mainly affecting partisan voters. Our findings may help candidates decide how to design effective campaigning by allocating resources both across multiple channels and within each channel, especially if the support from particular types of voters is weak.

Medicetra MedTech Company is a dental equipment distributor and senior management is deciding whether to implement a new incentive compensation program for the sales force. For many years, Medicetra had paid salespeople only a fixed salary. Although the current plan of a straight salary seemed to be working favorably towards sales force retention salespeople had limited monetary incentives to sell more, as increased sales did not directly relate to increased pay. Management is leaning towards a change to a variable compensation plan that links performance with pay and is considering three options: 1) commission; 2) quota-bonus; and 3) commission plus quota-bonus plans. Which compensation plan would induce behavioral changes that would lead to better sales force performance but, at the same time, would appear fair to other employees?

Luminopia—a start-up founded in January 2016 by three Harvard College freshmen—uses virtual reality technology to treat amblyopia (more commonly called “lazy eye”), the single biggest cause of visual disorders among children. By February 2017, the three founders had raised $950,000 in angel funding and developed a prototype of their virtual reality product, which was in use in clinical trials at Boston Children’s Hospital. As the founders prepare to bring their new medical device to market, they struggle with two key decisions: Should Luminopia create its own salesforce to sell its product or should it outsource? And how should the company price its device to maximize returns yet remain attractive to doctors, insurance providers, and individual patients?

Cyberdyne Inc. was a Japanese technology venture founded in 2004 by scientist Yoshiyuki Sankai to commercialize a hybrid assistive limb (HAL). HAL was a robotic exoskeleton system for people who had difficulty walking due to nervous system disabilities resulting from stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI), and intractable neuromuscular diseases. In a person with neuromuscular disorders, signals transmitted from the brain to steer muscle movement are weakened, causing ambulatory difficulty. HAL could noninvasively read faint signals that leaked to the skin surface and amplify them, which drove actuators to assist limb movement. In other words, when a person wearing HAL tried to move his or her limb, HAL assisted the person in moving the limb. As a result, HAL enabled the person’s brain to relearn how to walk, as HAL could reinforce the neurological system’s transmission. In order to sell and promote HAL in the U.S., the world’s largest medical device market, Cyberdyne submitted an application to the Food Drug and Administration (FDA) in November 2014 and eagerly awaited approval.
The case concentrates on the marketing decisions that Cyberdyne has to make to bring HAL to the U.S. market once Cyberdyne obtains FDA approval. The students can consider target-market selection and accompanying marketing-mix elements—distribution, promotion, and price. The case provides students the opportunity to understand and utilize marketing-mix elements when bringing a technologically innovative product to market in a business-to-business context.

V. S. Radhakrishan, CEO of Janalakshmi Financial Services, one of India’s largest urban microfinance organizations, was facing an HR dilemma. The sales force at JFS’s biggest division, Retail Financial Services, which focused on the distribution of small group-based loans, was experiencing declining productivity, and a high and above-market attrition rate. Radhakrishnan knew that as a microfinance institution, JFS’s success rested on the performance of its salespeople. He had directed HR to undertake a thorough review of the existing salesforce compensation scheme, and devise changes that would both inculcate a performance-oriented culture, and lower the attrition rate. He had also asked HR to find ways to align the incentives of salespeople with the firm’s social mission of serving the urban poor. HR had proposed several changes to compensation policy, but Radhakrishnan was unconvinced about many of the recommendations. He needed to make quick decisions; he had to present his views on HR policy changes to the company’s board of directors in a few hours.

Cyberdyne Inc. was a Japanese technology venture founded in 2004 by scientist Yoshiyuki Sankai to commercialize a hybrid assistive limb (HAL). HAL was a robotic exoskeleton system for people who had difficulty walking due to nervous system disabilities resulting from stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI), and intractable neuromuscular diseases. In a person with neuromuscular disorders, signals transmitted from the brain to steer muscle movement are weakened, causing ambulatory difficulty. HAL could noninvasively read faint signals that leaked to the skin surface and amplify them, which drove actuators to assist limb movement. In other words, when a person wearing HAL tried to move his or her limb, HAL assisted the person in moving the limb. As a result, HAL enabled the person’s brain to relearn how to walk, as HAL could reinforce the neurological system’s transmission. In order to sell and promote HAL in the U.S., the world’s largest medical device market, Cyberdyne submitted an application to the Food Drug and Administration (FDA) in November 2014 and eagerly awaited approval.
The case concentrates on the marketing decisions that Cyberdyne has to make to bring HAL to the U.S. market once Cyberdyne obtains FDA approval. The students can consider target-market selection and accompanying marketing-mix elements—distribution, promotion, and price. The case provides students the opportunity to understand and utilize marketing-mix elements when bringing a technologically innovative product to market in a business-to-business context.

This Core Curriculum Reading introduces students to (1) the importance of sales force design in implementing organizational strategy, and (2) the role of sales force management in linking structures and processes to behaviors. The material combines theoretical perspectives with real-world examples, drawn from the business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and nonprofit sectors, to illustrate the range of challenges and opportunities in this field.
The Reading includes an interactive illustration enabling students to test varying levels and combinations of fixed and variable compensation components. Three videos address the topics of (1) aligning strategy and sales, (2) engaging employees, and (3) using customer-feedback metrics in evaluation systems.

Outotec was a market leader in providing mining solutions to large mining companies. The
company's specialization and proprietary technology created value for its customers and helped the firm differentiate from its competitors. Yet, Outotec was not pricing or marketing its solutions in a way that took advantage of its distinct capabilities and value-add. Outotec used a cost-based (inside/out) pricing policy, which was the industry norm. As a result, operating profit was only 8% of sales and the CEO had promised the investment community improvements above 10%. The company and particularly the newly hired VP of Market Operations want to move from a cost-based (inside/out) to a value-based (outside/in) pricing and selling model to capture more profitable revenues and meet profitability targets the CEO announced to investors. But there are several challenges to this, which the case study highlights for students to discuss and debate.

Outotec was a market leader in providing mining solutions to large mining companies. The
company's specialization and proprietary technology created value for its customers and helped the firm differentiate from its competitors. Yet, Outotec was not pricing or marketing its solutions in a way that took advantage of its distinct capabilities and value-add. Outotec used a cost-based (inside/out) pricing policy, which was the industry norm. As a result, operating profit was only 8% of sales and the CEO had promised the investment community improvements above 10%. The company and particularly the newly hired VP of Market Operations want to move from a cost-based (inside/out) to a value-based (outside/in) pricing and selling model to capture more profitable revenues and meet profitability targets the CEO announced to investors. But there are several challenges to this, which the case study highlights for students to discuss and debate.

Research Summary

Professor Chung models the effect of incentive compensation to study its impact on the sales force. Using data from a Fortune 500 company, he has developed a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus-based compensation plan and examined how various components of the plan affect the performance of sales agents. While bonuses enhance productivity across all segments, strong and weak performers exhibit differences. The best sales people can sustain their high levels of productivity even after attaining their quotas with the incentive of overachievement commissions, and weaker performers can be kept on track toward annual quotas with the incentive of quarterly bonuses.

Professor Chung also studies the impact of unconditional incentives, such as recognition and awards. Further, he is examining how framing a compensation plan can have different outcomes in sales force performance. He finds, in the short run, that the more vicious the incentive plan is, the more immediate the impact on performance. However, there are more negative effects in performance in the long-run. Recognition and rewards, on the other hand, have limited impact in the short-run but produce significant improvement in performance in the long-run.

Professor Chung is expanding his research to include cultural factors by investigating the effect of local and global incentives in businesses in Asia and Latin America.

Teaching

Personal selling is the primary (and sometimes the only) form of marketing activity for many firms, especially in a business-to-business context. The course focuses on the tactical component of managing a salesforce and on the strategic element of linking sales force management with business strategy. The case studies used in the course will cover a variety of industries ranging from door-to-door selling to professional services firms (e.g., a law firm).

A key element of the course is a graded team project—either a field project sourced by the student(s) or a library project—that makes use of the content learned in the course to analyze a business situation and provide recommendations.

Business markets differ from consumer markets in important ways. Typically, the buying process is more complex, the buying units and purchase criteria differ, and marketing decisions are more closely interrelated with firm-wide strategic choices. In addition, personal selling (sales) is often a core part of go-to-market activities in B2B contexts. The course focuses on both the strategic and field implementation aspects of managing these issues in business markets.

A key element of the course is a graded team project—either a field project sourced by the student(s) or a library project—that makes use of the content learned in the course to analyze a business situation and provide recommendations.

Students will be in charge of presenting and discussing the assigned articles. They will be expected to come to class prepared, having thoroughly read all papers in each session. Each student is required to give one presentation (maximum 15 pages) during the semester on the paper assigned to them, that will include a discussion of the key ideas of the paper, the theoretical analysis, empirical tests (if any), limitations, and directions for future research that build on the issues raised by the articles. In addition, for all sessions each student will prepare a brief written summary and evaluation of the papers that are not assigned to him/her but which will be covered that day.

Business markets differ from consumer markets in important ways. Typically, the buying process is more complex, the buying units and purchase criteria differ, and marketing decisions are more closely interrelated with firm-wide strategic choices. In addition, personal selling and sales management are often core parts of go-to-market activities in B2B contexts. The course focuses on both the strategic and field implementation aspects of managing these issues in business markets. An important theme in both case discussions and field projects (see below) is linking strategy with sales in B2B markets.

Rather than our standard case exam, a key element of the course is a field project—either sourced by the student(s) or linked to projects sponsored by our alumni or members in our executive programs—and a paper analyzing the situation and articulating the recommendations and learnings. Students will be organized in teams for the projects.

Marketing

The objectives of this course are to demonstrate the role of marketing in the company; to explore the relationship of marketing to other functions; and to show how effective marketing builds on a thorough understanding of buyer behavior to create value for customers.

Students learn how to:

Make marketing decisions in the context of general management.

Control the elements of the marketing mix—product policy, channels of distribution, communication, and pricing—to satisfy customer needs profitably.

Use this knowledge in a brand management simulation.

The course culminates in an examination of the evolution of marketing, particularly focusing on opportunities presented by the Internet.

Awards & Honors

Member of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society.

Finalist for the 2015 Frank M. Bass Dissertation Paper Award for the best marketing paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal.

Finalist for the 2014 John D. C. Little Award for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science that year.